Planning business travel can be time-consuming and tiring. You have to juggle multiple factors—prices, policies, risks, total expenses, and more. With so many moving parts, planning a business trip single-handedly in Kolkata, New Delhi, or wherever you are in India can be a lot of work.
If only there was an easier way…
Enter—corporate travel management companies.
A travel management company does all the heavy lifting on your behalf to plan, manage, and monitor all business trips. It’s like having a travel agent in your pocket wherever you go.
We’ve rounded up the top corporate travel management companies in India to make business travel easy for your team. In this article, we’ll cover:
- The benefits of using a travel management company
- Features to look for when choosing a travel management company
- The five best corporate travel management companies in India
5 Benefits of using a travel management company
If you’re spending a frustrating amount of time planning travel arrangements for your business trips, here’s how a corporate travel company can help:
- Save money on travel bookings: worldwide inventories mean more options at better prices, so you can rest assured you’re finding a great booking.
- Simplified booking: Give employees an easier way to manage their business travel with self-booking engines and assistance from travel experts and tour operators.
- Centralised operations: Check all aspects of your travel booking at a single place—reservations, costs, potential risks, and analytical reports.
- Increase compliance: Enforce your travel policy more stringently with approval workflows to detect unauthorised or out-of-policy reservations.
- Data-driven decision-making: Analyse every trip based on expenses, travel time, and other parameters to make strategic decisions.
Working with corporate travel agencies in India can improve the ROI of your organisation’s travel program. It helps efficiently manage your business travel requirements and deliver a better travel experience.
Features to look for when choosing a travel management company
With so many corporate travel companies in India, picking the best fit for your business is not the easiest decision. To help you make an informed choice, we’ve listed all the must-have features to look for in a good TMC:
- Inventory size: Check the variety of options you can choose from. The bigger the inventory, the more flexibility you’ll have to compare and select your travel options and find the best deal.
- Flexible travel booking: Meetings get pushed, and trips get cancelled—that’s how businesses work. Your TMC should allow you to make any last-minute changes to the itineraries without hassle.
- Customer support: A good travel management company will offer not only 24/7 support to help your employees throughout the trip, but also a speedy response time that gets you solutions to your travel issues.
- Expense management: A travel management company should offer in-depth insights into your travel costs to enable more informed decision making in the future.
- Reporting and analytics: Creating analytical reports for every trip with data-backed insights will show you exactly where you’re spending and indicate patterns.
- Compliance and approval: Partnering with a good corporate travel management company in India can improve travel-related compliance with simple approval flows and travel policy integration.
Let’s explore the best corporate travel management companies you need to have on your radar.
5 Best corporate travel management companies in India
If you’re looking for the best corporate travel management companies in the Indian travel industry, we have just the list for you.
These TMCs are either based in India, or have ample experience with India-based customers—both are equipped to deal with your corporate travel needs.
1. TravelPerk
TravelPerk is a feature-packed corporate travel management solution for companies of every scale and industry. The platform enables companies and travel managers to streamline business travel from start to finish—including booking, managing, and reporting on travel.
Employees can find the best prices using a self-serve booking engine, and employers can enforce their travel policy using its in-built approval workflows.
Here’s a rundown of some of TravelPerk’s intuitive features for effortless travel management:
- Best-in-class travel inventory: choose flights, accomodation, car rentals, and more from TravelPerk’s industry-leading travel inventory.
- Flexible bookings with FlexiPerk: Make last-minute changes and get a guaranteed refund of 80% of your booking cost when you cancel a trip up to two hours before departure.
- Make travel sustainable with GreenPerk: Hit your carbon control and sustainability targets with the unique carbon offsetting program, GreenPerk.
- Ease of expense management: Optimise your expenditure on every trip by actively tracking all expenses before, during, and after a trip.
- Efficient risk management with TravelCare: Get real-time alerts about potential risks and threats—like lockdowns, political unrest, or natural disasters—with TravelCare.
- 24/7 customer care support: Get 15-second response time, high-quality support from the TravelPerk support team on any travel issues that might come up.
- Third-party software integrations: connect TravelPerk with your favorite tools for a streamlined travel management process. The platform integrates with a wide variety of software, including Expensify, BambooHR, deskpass, and many more.
- Travel and risk management: make more informed decisions when it comes to bookings and tweaking trips. Keep your employees’ safety at the forefront of your business with risk and safety alerts on locations you’re planning to visit.
TravelPerk allows you to plan multiple trips simultaneously without worrying about cost overruns, complicated processes, or employee safety. It brings everything on a single platform to make the process seamless.
See how TravelPerk makes business travel stress free
2. ITILITE
ITILITE is a leading travel management company based out of Bangalore. The company has a suite of tools for travel booking, expense management, traveller safety, and consulting.
Here’s what differentiates ITILITE from other travel management services in India:
- Unified booking tools: Plan and book your reservations more efficiently with smart features like cost predictor, personalised options, and more.
- Virtual consultant: Rely on ITILITE Mastermind, an AI-powered consultant, to reduce violations of your travel policy using key metrics.
- Expense management: Accurately track and handle expenses with easily scannable expense filing and multi-level checks.
- Incentivise savings: Minimise your travel spend with incentives for employees to choose the cheaper, policy-compliant options.
- Managed bookings: Get end-to-end travel services and support for every trip from ITILITE’s experienced consultants.
Despite a long list of features, ITILITE doesn’t match many unique offerings from TravelPerk—like the carbon offsetting program, flexible cancellations, and comprehensive reporting. They also don’t offer any solution for organizing and booking corporate events, unlike TravelPerk Events.
3. International Travel House
International Travel House is one of India’s most well-known corporate travel agencies. The service provider has a wide network of suppliers spread across the country. They offer specialised business travel services with new-age technologies to help organisations manage their travel needs.
Here are the features offered by International Travel House:
- Variety of services: Choose from a wide range of services, like hotel bookings, passport and visa facilitation, car rental, travel insurance, foreign exchange, and more.
- Flexible bookings: Get procurement support to cancel or modify reservations at the last minute and receive compensation for any flight delays.
- Robust reporting: Enjoy complete visibility into your trips with insightful reports, like traveller tracking, carbon footprint, policy compliance, and net promoter score.
- Specialised services: Pick unique services to supplement your travel program, like end-to-end travel management using TravelSmart.
- GlobalStar network: ITH is a member of the GlobalStar network and gets the best deals from international travel management companies.
While ITH excels in its relationships with suppliers across the country, it doesn’t offer an online booking tool, nor does it provide the same level of convenience and control as TravelPerk. It also lacks many other key functionalities expected from a TMC—and provided by TravelPerk—such as policy compliance, traveler tracking, and carbon emission offsetting.
4. CWT
CWT is a data-driven travel management company with offices in India. The company helps startups and medium-sized enterprises deliver a holistically better travel experience.
Here are a few best features CWT is known for:
- Hassle-free mobile app: Plan and monitor your bookings on the go with the myCWT travel app.
- Sustainable travel: Design and implement an eco-conscious travel policy rooted in sustainable targets to reduce carbon footprint.
- Consolidated platform: Get every detail of your bookings in a single place with CWT’s intuitive technology.
Although CWT offers a variety of features, customers report having issues when it comes to getting quality support—or any support at all, really. When compared to TravelPerk’s 15-second wait times and high-quality, around the clock support, CWT’s doesn’t quite match up.
Alongside this, TravelPerk also triumphs over CWT with its intuitive platform and wider inventory—travel managers can find more options, more easily. Plus, TravelPerk offers a larger variety of corporate travel solutions, including carbon offsetting and traveler tracking.
5. FCM Travel
FCM Travel is another popular corporate travel management company in India, with headquarters in Mumbai. The company offers out-of-box solutions to modern businesses, like end-to-end travel management, account management, and safety and risk management.
Let’s look at FCM’s best features:
- Plug-and-play platform: Use advanced technology with complete agility to plan your trips from start to finish and integrate it within your current setup.
- Actionable reporting: Turn data into decisions with on-demand reporting and custom metrics to give you valuable insights.
- Deliver duty of care: Be prepared to tackle any risks or security issues and protect your employees in every scenario.
FCM Travel is an advanced solution for corporate travel management. However, unlike TravelPerk, they don’t help you reach your sustainability targets or offer traveler tracking for traveling employees..
Make a wise choice of a corporate travel company in India
Choosing the right travel management company for your organization can be time-consuming and stressful—especially with so many on the market. Find a solution that best meets your needs—whether that’s increased flexibility, high-quality support, or a wealth of travel options.
If you want a TMC with these three features—plus many more—TravelPerk’s the one for you. The all-in-one travel management solution has won 4.7-stars on Capterra.
Why not join thousands of happy travelers and start simplifying business travel for you and your team. Try TravelPerk free today.
Source by www.travelperk.com